Earlier this year, walking the south side of Whitechapel High Street in London’s East End I passed an advertisement for the cinematic release of the film The Infidel. Staring at me from a poster on the side of a bus stop was the film’s hero Omid Djalili. A curious figure he’s presented as cultural confusion embodied.
The central question of Escape Routes sounds quite simple: ‘How does social transformation begin?’ But the answer that the book provides is provocative and contests many dominant explanations of social change: according to the authors it is not the brimming revolutionary events occupying the imagination of the left that capture the mechanics of social transformation but the seemingly ‘insignificant occurrences of people’s daily actions’.
For those of you with a soft spot for the anthropomorphized cartoon dog surfing the Internet, Lisa Nakamura abolishes such nostalgia, and misunderstanding. Half way through Digitizing Race, she coolly declares ‘…nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog…’.
Paul Gilroy carries a lot of symbolic weight. In our transnational academic milieu, Gilroy’s status as a superstar professor overdetermines his writing, forcing a peculiar disjuncture between the character of his project and the expectations of his eager audience. While Gilroy speaks of a poststructural cultural politics, he is too often forced into the position of custodian or leader that sometimes rubs up uncomfortably with his analysis…
This essay revisits Marc Bousquet’s insight that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes. This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers…
When District 9 was released…the film was an immediate box office hit…This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished…that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa.
